The Rival's Touch

I hit Eagle's Perch Overlook at dusk, six hours of climbing in my legs and a first place medal from the regional cook-off still rattling around in my head like a coin in a dryer. My shoulders ached. My boots had a blister working on my left heel. I didn't care. I had won. Chef Ellie Okonkwo herself had shaken my hand and said my duck was the best plate of the night, and I, Ana Macdonald, thirty-four years old and professional cook, had earned three days of solitude in the woods to celebrate.

The only flat spot at the site had an orange tent on it.

I stood there with my pack still on and stared at it. I knew that tent. I had seen it in a gear review, in person at the trailhead bar three months ago, and in my head probably a hundred times since, usually right before I said something I regretted.

Seth Grantham came out of the trees carrying his water filter like he had somewhere better to be.

"You," he said.

"Me," I said. "This is my site. I have the permit."

"I have the same permit. Sites aren't assigned out here." He set the filter on a rock. "There's one flat spot and I have it."

"You got here first, fine. But the site is shared, by rule. Fire ring, bear box, everything. So unless you plan to leave, we're splitting it."

He looked at me the way he looks at a trail map, like he's checking it for errors. "I came here to be alone."

"So did I. I got a medal on Saturday and I want to sit somewhere quiet and enjoy it."

"What medal?"

"Cooking competition. First place. Regional." I said it faster than I meant to.

He made a small sound that might have been a laugh. "A cooking medal. And you're carrying a forty pound pack up here to celebrate."

"Some of us have more than one hobby, Grantham."

That got a longer look. Then he shrugged and pointed at the far side of the fire ring. "Take that side. I'll keep my stuff on mine."

"Fine."

"Fine."

And that was the negotiation. Seth Grantham, ultramarathoner, gear reviewer for two magazines, a man who had once told me at the trailhead bar that hydration bladders were for people who plan to fail, agreed to share a campsite with me. No hard feelings. Or at least none spoken out loud.

We built the fire together without talking about it. He gathered wood, I arranged it, he lit it. It worked so smoothly it annoyed me.

Dinner was freeze-dried lasagna for me and some beige pouch of engineered calories for him. He read the label like it contained philosophy. We ate in a silence so stiff I could have propped a door open with it.

"Good view," he said once, at the pines going black against the violet sky.

"Yeah," I said.

The conversation consisted of that. I counted it as his fault. The man speaks maybe forty words a day and I refuse to do eighty percent of the talking for both of us.

By full dark I was done pretending to enjoy his company. I said goodnight, crawled into my little one-person tent, and zipped the door shut behind me. The air inside smelled like crushed pine needles and nylon. My headlamp threw a red glow over everything, which made my pack look like a crime scene, so I switched it to white.

Here's a thing you should know about me. I planned this trip as a reward, and part of the reward, packed at the very bottom of my bag under the rain fly and the spare socks, was a vibrator. Small, teal, USB rechargeable, about the size of a fat marker. I had bought it a week ago for exactly this purpose. Somewhere quiet, somewhere nobody could hear me, a night of unwinding after a long stretch of double shifts and competition stress.

I dug it out, along with a wipe from my first aid kit because I am a professional and I have standards, and I got out of my hiking pants and most of my top layers. The tent was cold but I had my bag half unzipped to lie on. Not bad, honestly. Not bad for a woman sleeping on rock at eight thousand feet.

A girl needs comfort after a day of being stared down by a man in tactical shorts. That's what those shorts are, I decided. Tactical. Like he expected the mountain to attack him. The man owns clothing designed for war and he uses it to judge weekend hikers.

I lay back and clicked the toy on to its lowest setting. It gave a low hum, polite, like a phone on vibrate in a coat pocket. I held it against my inner thigh first, just letting it sit there. The buzz worked through the muscle and I felt my shoulders drop about two inches. Six hours of climbing, a standoff by a fire ring, and one medal. I deserved this.

I moved it up slow, along the crease of my thigh, not touching anything important yet. Through the nylon I could hear the wind coming up the valley, pushing at the trees. And I could hear the fire popping across the site. And underneath that, faintly, my own hum traveling through the tent floor like I was sitting on a speaker.

The walls of this tent are thin. I knew that when I bought it. I had not thought about it in the store, but I thought about it now. The fabric moved with every gust. If Seth was still up by the fire, fine. If he had gone to his tent, also fine. He was a monosyllable with legs. We would never discuss it. We would never discuss anything.

I pressed the toy against me through the thin fabric of my underwear, just resting it there, and my hips did a small thing on their own. Okay. Good. That's the spot.

That's when the shadow moved.

Against the side wall of my tent, lit from behind by my own headlamp, a shape crossed. Tall, shoulders first. Seth, walking past to his own tent. I heard his zipper go up in one long pull, the shuffle of him getting in, and then his tent went quiet.

I froze with the toy still humming against me.

So here is the part where I admit I made a choice. I could have turned it off. I could have lain there like a statue until he fell asleep, which for a man like him is probably four minutes after his head hits the ground. That was the polite option. That was